Iron Council

China Mieville

The world of the New Crobuzon city-state is loosely based on the
European industrial revolution's "steam age", mixed together with
an extraordinarily inventive range of fantastic features. People are
"remade" into strange forms in punishment factories, there are all kinds
of nonhuman sentients — cactus people, insect-like kephri, and more
— and there are a diverse range of magics. The Mayor and Parliament
rule through a brutal Militia, but revolutionary factions abound and a
draining war with Tesh is fuelling discontent.

Cutter leads a band of insurrectionists from the Caucus, looking for
the golem creator Judah. They fight a series of battles as they travel
across a war-torn landscape, seeking the semi-mythical Iron Council, a
group of railway workers who rebelled and escaped into the wilderness.
Meanwhile Ori is involved with the shifting revolutionary factions in
New Crobuzon. He joins one of the more violent groups, which eventually
launches a plot to assassinate the Mayor.

Much of the "colour" of Iron Council comes from politics, with allusions
to historical groups and events, most obviously to various socialist and
anarchist movements and to the Paris Commune. It attempts to harness
the pathos and power of revolutionary myth and history, but the result
is mostly poor pastiche, nowhere approaching the drama of real history.
The historical links are weak, often mismatched with the peculiar
features of New Crobuzon, and unable to carry the sentiment Mieville
tries to invest them with. And there's not enough background for anyone
to actually care about the New Crobuzon revolution in its own right:
Iron Council has neither actual political philosophy nor social detail
nor real people.

Another annoying feature of Iron Council is that everything is
subservient to the special effects of the moment. At one point, for
example, we read:

"With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had
given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of
astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there
were smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran
his hand over it and walked on.

It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did
not smear."

But though Ori and Jacobs continue to roam the city, the rain never
features again — it's just a completely ad hoc device to highlight the
mysteriousness of the spiral symbols. This is a trivial example, but
this kind of thing recurs at different levels throughout Iron Council:
strange wondrous monsters are invented, new magics deployed, characters
introduced and then disposed of, new words coined — all to help enhance
a single encounter, battle, scene, or piece of dialogue.

Mieville's characterisation is weak. The three central characters manage
to get less and less interesting as time goes by, to the point where
the deaths of two of them are of no moment. The plot and Mieville's
dazzling invention hold Iron Council together and kept me reading
to the end, but the overall effect is, apart from a few novel ideas,
unmemorable and unlikely to bear rereading. It was no doubt unwise of
me to expect more, but the fuss about Mieville and the recommendations
of friends had raised my hopes.

Note: I haven't read Mieville's earlier books set in the same world —
Perdido Street Station and The Scar — but Iron Council is entirely
self-contained.